Very Disapointed!
I am adding to my previous review. I haven’t used it for more than a year so I hoped things had improved. First it failed miserably at recognizing company naees as names for people. Secondly it didn’t offer RN (registered nurse), or NP (nurse practitioner) as valid suffixes. I gave up trying to use the program at this point.
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I had almost 8000 contacts. Well not really there were a lot of duplicates. I made two backups before I started. The first one was a large vCard file (address cards) the second was a contacts archive. When I ran it it suggested making a backup. It scanned them all pretty quickly. Contacts Cleaner found a lot with only one name. In most cases it was only a first name. I decided to “fix” the problem and it repeated the first name as a last name. Now a lot of these are also duplicates, but itdidn’t seem to know that Bob (first name) with no last name and a duplicate of Bob with no last name and all other fields the same was a duplicate either before or after I searched for duplicates. There were other duplicates that it missed by simply not recognizing them as duplicates. I scanned and reran scans for duplicates several times and it would find one when I knew there was at least one other one with eight duplicates of one contact.
The net result was my confidence level is way down. I have know idea what has been done. So I sent looking for what should have been thee backups made the same day. I have no idea where Contacts cleaner put the backup it made. Searching for all files made today on ‘this mac’ didn’t show it.
I have since reverted to the backup I made.
[NOTE if you have notes in your contacts saving your data from Apple’s Contacts App as a vCard file the notes seem to get lost. Saving your contacts from Apple’s Contacts App as a Contacts Archive file seems to preserve them. At least that is the way it seemed to work.]
In any case I would strongly suggest you consider finding an application to export your contacts as a ‘CSV file (a text file with tab or commas seuerating the fields and a hard return at the end of each record.) before and after running the program and then comparing the files with a word processor or if you can use the command line tools using diff to see what changed. [NOTE if there are hard returns in the notes the CSV file I used they are put into separate rows one for each return.]
I confess that I haven’t searched for Contacts Cleaner documentation that describes in detail what each of the options in Contact Cleaner does so my complaints may be attributeable to operator rather than a failure of Contacts Cleaner.
I was surprised to find that Contacts Cleaner complained about telephone numbers containing a semicolon (;). The semicolon is insered by my iPhone to tell the ohone two wait before sending the next set of numbers.
Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary.
captain-nice about Contacts Cleaner
